When I heard that Gabriel García Márquez had died, I immediately thought of three things: the fine grit of Iraqi sand that scratched between the page and my fingertips, the metal cot with springs that squeaked like those beneath a prostitute’s well-worn bed, and the way my forearms ached as I lay in my hooch on Camp Liberty (Baghdad, 2005) and held a hardbound copy of 100 Years of Solitude above my head, absorbed in what I’d long put off reading.

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. James Parker calls this Dickensian coming-of-age novel “an enveloping and slightly paralyzing literary experience, such that if you submit to it in the proper spirit your Twitter feed may go unchecked, your Facebook page unrefreshed, for days or perhaps weeks.”

“Because I am, essentially, a reading addict, my impulse is simply to rip right through a book, fiction or nonfiction, just for the animal pleasure of it. But sad experience has shown that if I abandon myself in this way, I will finish the book without being able to say much except: Boy was that ever good, you should read it.” — BNR columnist Katherine A. Powers, this year’s recipient of the National Book Critic’s Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Michio Kaku’s first book, Hyperspace. Since then, the personable (his many media appearances testify to his charm), verbally gifted, enthusiastic, science-proselytizing physicist has shared his own feelings of awe at the universe and the humans who inhabit it. Reading one of his books is like hijacking Kaku’s oversized intelligence and enthusiasms to stoke your own sense of wonder. His latest is no exception.